Tag Archives: en

The U.S. battle against privacy in U.N.

The Cable reports in their exclusive about the battle being fought by America against on-line privacy in an obscure U.N. General Assembly committee that is looking to constraint the widespread surveillance of the Internet. The proposal by Germany and Brazil spearheads the mounting movement inside U.N. that seeks to uphold the Internet privacy as a basic human right. The Cable notes that “American representatives have made it clear that they won’t tolerate such checks on their global surveillance network.”… -->

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Twitter Quitter or twitterquitter?

Hey, I just came across a wonderful couple of definitions in the Urban Dictionary. They are both about Twitter and both about quitting and they rhyme same but they mean different things. I do not know about you but I caught some luls from this. Check it out: Twitter Quitter and twitterquitter. Eh, what am I? Both!!!

I was actually looking for Twitter Widower Support Group, I heard they give out t-shirts. That turns out to be just a rumour. Or do they exist and I simply could not find them?..… -->

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U.S. Child Exchange

Reuters published an investigative report on the practice of exchanging adopted children on the Internet in USA recently. The parents adopting foreign children in U.S. advertise the kids they did not like on the Internet boards, like Yahoo and Facebook, and find quickly new homes for them without ever verifying who the other people are. Many children change several families in a short time, get lots and lots of abuse and suffer humiliation.

Speaking publicly about her experience for the first time, one girl adopted from China and later sent to a second home said she was made to dig her own grave. Another re-homed child, a Russian girl, recounted how a boy in one house urinated on her after the two had sex; she was 13 at the time and was re-homed three times in six months.

I am happy to know that Russia forbid adoption to U.S. since last year.

More: Russia launches criminal inquiry into U.S. child exchanges… -->

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Automatic language tagging with Polylang in WordPress

I use the Polylang plugin for the multi-language capabilities of the sites written on WordPress. One feature that I implemented and find extremely useful is the automatic tagging of the posts with a language tag (like “en”, “ru”, etc.) when the post is saved. The code that goes into the functions.php file of the theme is as follows:

function tigra_add_polylang_language_tag( $post_id ) {
        global $polylang;
        if (isset($polylang) ) {
                if ( !$polylang->model->get_post_language($post_id) ) {
                        $polylang->model->set_post_language($post_id, pll_default_language());
                }
                $post_lang = $polylang->model->get_post_language($post_id);
                $languages = $polylang->model->get_languages_list(array('fields' => 'slug'));
                $post_tags = get_the_tags($post_id);
                $post_tags = wp_list_pluck($post_tags, 'name');
                $post_tags = array_diff($post_tags, $languages);
                if ( empty($post_tags) ) {
                        $post_tags = array();
                }
                array_push($post_tags, $post_lang->slug);
                wp_set_post_tags($post_id, $post_tags);
        }
}
add_action( 'save_post', 'tigra_add_polylang_language_tag' );

The code verifies that the default language is set (as I heard some reports that the mobile applications sometimes manage to bypass the Polylang capabilities) and sets it if necessary. Then, it extracts all tags from the post, wipes all supported (selected in Polylang configuration) language tags and adds a single tag corresponding to the language of the post.

This procedure makes sure that the language tag is always present and that the old tag is wiped when you change the language of the post. Now you can retrieve the posts, sort or do other manipulations based on the tag.

Big kudos to Chouby for the plugin and the help with code.… -->

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Leda Monster Bunny – better than sex text

How often did I wonder what the search results are really based on? I get sometimes really strange things thrown at me all of a sudden. And here I am, looking at some articles about getting the best impression with Google, and what do I find?

You get the best impression with Google simply by being Leda Monster Bunny. Otherwise, it’s hopeless. No, really, she is getting millions of hits on YouTube and all for just, what, being cute? And we are struggling to get our websites well organized and respectful to all those guidelines for webmasters and all, sweating day and night through the little details of our code. I think I cannot help but feel just a little bit envious that someone gets to be in the top for just a bit of good looks and cosmetics.

Now I understand why people turn to those fairly complicated techniques of SEO – they desperately hope that this cosmetics will do wonders for their sites and the sites will sky-rocket like Leda Monster Bunny videos. But, you know what? She works hard too, it takes her time, dedication and effort to look like that. So, that is what it really takes – effort, time, dedication. We will get there.… -->

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Got “social contract”?

I have heard the words “social contract” one too many times lately. My idea of freedom starts with the freedom of thought and I do not like fuzzy concepts that cloud judgement. I decided to find out what “social contract” actually means. Did you know that the concept itself is centuries old?

At its very basic, we are told that the social contract is an implied contract that one enters into by being a member of society. The contract offers the citizen certain protections while requiring that the citizen will be justly punished for breaking the laws of that society. The concept was first fleshed out by Socrates although he himself refuted the concept as the source of justice later arguing that the justice is inherent to men and cannot originate externally.

This contradiction and inconsistency is carried through the later works of Thomas Hobbes that form the ground for nearly all social contract theorists. The inconsistency, presented by Hobbes, could only be resolved again by admitting that the relationship between the society and the individual does not form the ground for morality. On the contrary, the natural morality of men makes the ground for the forming of the society and its rules.

People do not have an inherent desire to kill, rob and rape. Quite the contrary, if the society norms and laws were lifted today, we would likely go ahead just as we did before, cheerfully helping each other and being nice to strangers. People do not steal, rape and murder not because of some ephemeral social contract but because they are not inclined to. However, we do notice that some people have a tendency for misbehaving, right?

On the one hand, we have to admit that people who have the tendency to steal, murder and rape do so whether the society has mechanisms for punishing the said behaviours or not. On the other hand, we notice that these behaviours are tightly coupled to the possession of property. Unsurprisingly, Locke based his concept of social contract on the idea that men only have disputes when property is involved. The relationships within families are pre-social, they are moral agreements entered to and carried out willingly. As soon as people start having property, claims to property and property disputes, the relationships deteriorate and the necessity to protect oneself and one’s property arises.

Recognizing the problem, … -->

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Morning news

Want news? – Read blogs!

I have this strange habit of reading news in the morning. Not that I have a newspaper and a cup of coffee, no. But I have a cup of tea and read the news online. Today is one of those silly days when my news feed is jammed with one single news item. Today it is Twitter – security of Twitter was improved in some way and every single newspaper and online publication in the world seems to make it their duty to make a big splash about it. Okay, maybe, just maybe, I want to get a notice of that, somewhere in a corner, three words. I definitely not interested so much as to read the whole morning news about it.

In a word, the morning news reading is spoiled. This happens from time to time. The news in this “networked world” are weird. Either there is a lot of “buzz” – irrelevant small items or everyone is copying each other on the same item all over the place. It does seem like reading the consolidated blog feed of sites you care about is, after all, the best way to get news in today’s world. We have to get used to the fact that most relevant news are not delivered anymore by general news outlets but by very specific people with a passion to write about events that matter to them personally.… -->

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Blog moved to tigr.net

I finally made the move from the wordpress.com platform to my own site, tigr.net. The move is long overdue and I hope that not having to jump around between three sites will let me concentrate on more important things. I first moved the blogs to a separate site but then I was hit with a realization that I still keep then a static site and a wordpress site and have to care for both. Now everything is in one place. To enjoy it, head over to Tigr.net.… -->

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Privacy, Democracy and Big Data

I read recently two very interesting articles that discuss in depth the current problems with the internet, privacy and democracy implications. I highly recommend reading both:

  • The Real Privacy Problem
  • Three Paradoxes of Big Data

The Internet and the related technologies erode the very fabric of society. They do so quietly, surreptitiously, in little steps. As usual, do not blame the tool, blame those that use it for evil. Although some tools better not have existed in the first place, I feel.… -->

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